Alberto was shackled with ankle and waist chains last December when he flew in an airplane for the first time of his life. He and a dozen other Central American refugees were being transported from a Border Patrol detention center in Texas, where Alberto had been held for 25 days, to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in York County Prison, Pennsylvania, where he would spend the next nine weeks. When he arrived, his clothes were confiscated and he was handed an orange jumpsuit, three pairs of boxers, two sheets, and a blanket. Then he was brought to a dormitory with 60 bunks and as many detainees. The room was freezing, and it stayed that way. “They would charge us $17 for a good sweater,” he told me. “And there were a lot of guys in there whose families couldn’t send them any money.”

The center’s day room included a TV permanently set to a channel in English, which few of the detainees spoke, so most of the time they played cards and other games left behind by people who had been transferred out or deported. For one hour a day, the detainees were allowed to use an indoor yard with a basketball hoop. Before they were let out to use it, one of the officers would open all of the windows to let in the freezing winter air, for no other reason, as far as Alberto could tell, than to make them miserable.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent detains an undocumented immigrant along a railroad track near the Rio Grande River at the U.S.-Mexico border on Sept. 8, 2014, near McAllen, Texas.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Alberto, a slender 18-year-old with high cheekbones, was a victim of violence, not a perpetrator. Three months before, Alberto had fled El Salvador to avoid near certain death and had journeyed north with the expectation that in the United States, his human rights would count for something. He sought protection. Instead, he found himself freezing in a prison, surrounded by guards who taunted him with racist insults, alongside dozens of other immigrants from places like Honduras and Eritrea, some of whom had been incarcerated there for longer than a year.

In 2014, 68,000 unaccompanied minors streamed across the border to escape horrific gang violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Over the last 18 months, however, the Central American refugee crisis has largely receded from headlines. The number of unaccompanied child refugees arriving at the border dropped by almost half between 2014, when the surge peaked, and 2015, but these sanguine figures mask the gritty persistence of an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. Most of the decline in the influx has resulted not from a decrease in violence in Central America, but from the Obama administration’s success in subcontracting its unwanted role in the drama to Mexico. The U.S. has provided millions of dollars in equipment and training to Mexican immigration authorities to bolster enforcement of its southern border with Guatemala and Belize. Apprehensions in Mexico have gone up by 71 percent, without an accompanying expansion of screenings for legitimate asylum claims.

As a result, many refugees are being summarily deported back to the countries they fled — countries in which they have been personally targeted for murder, rape, and gang conscription — before ever having a chance to present their claims for asylum before an American immigration judge. Those, like Alberto, who are fortunate enough to evade the Mexican crackdown face long odds of winning asylum when they arrive in the United States. In the meantime, they’re warehoused in prisons and treated by American immigration courts as if they were the violent gangsters they risked their lives to escape. “They make you feel like some big criminal,” Alberto told me, “when the only ‘crime’ you’ve done is cross the border, fleeing.”

In 2014, after the influx of Central American refugees, Fred Morris helped establish a refugee welcome center in Los Angeles.

On the afternoon of July 1, 2014, three buses full of Central American refugees, mostly children and their mothers, pulled into the small desert town of Murrieta, in Southern California’s Inland Empire, where they were due to be processed at a Border Patrol station. They found their path blocked by several hundred American flag-waving protesters, who surrounded the buses, screaming “Go home!,” “Send them back!” and “USA!” Images of the protests and the counterprotests that followed saturated cable news for weeks, touching off a fiery public debate and inflaming the nativist infection in American political culture.

Fred Morris, an octogenarian Methodist pastor with a thinning head of ginger hair and a weathered face, watched the footage on the news from his Los Angeles home 100 miles away. As a young missionary in Brazil in the 1970s, Morris had been kidnapped and tortured by that country’s military dictatorship for his associations with a Catholic archbishop who had denounced the human rights abuses of right-wing juntas throughout Latin America. In the 1980s, he lived in Costa Rica, where he published a newsletter called Mesoamerica that criticized the Reagan administration’s military and diplomatic interventions in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. As he watched events unfold in Murrieta, Morris was appalled by the malice Americans were showing to children and mothers fleeing the devastation wrought, in part, by the wars of that era.

To counter the message of hatred radiating through the airwaves, Morris and his colleagues established a Refugee Welcome Center in North Hills, a neighborhood in the middle of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, a vast, sun-soaked concrete plain of strip malls and single-family homes, taco trucks, and pupuserias. Church leaders wanted to show the world at large and the refugees in particular that the spasm of chauvinism in Murrieta did not represent all Americans. The church’s staff drove around the area, a heavily immigrant community, plastering the neighborhood with flyers, inviting refugees looking for help to come to the center. “We kind of trashed the Valley with these flyers,” Morris told me. “And people began to trickle in.”

Alberto’s mother, Jacinta, was one of the refugees who found her way there. The Refugee Welcome Center is situated within the United Methodist Church Center, a small complex of plain-looking, single-story white stucco buildings that form a horseshoe around an outdoor courtyard with a small lawn. Jacinta, 38 years old, is a round woman with a friendly face. She asked me not to use her last name, and to use her sons’ middle names, to protect them from retaliation. She sat with me and my wife, who was translating, at a picnic table in the courtyard, next to a dozen refugee children and teenagers playing soccer on the lawn. She recounted the horrors of her history to us in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she were making small talk about her job.

When she fled El Salvador three years ago, she told us, she had never heard of asylum. The last thing on her mind, as she rushed to a friend’s house to hide her two sons from the gang members who might murder them, or as she paid $4,000 to a relative who worked as a coyote and slipped away with him in the night, was the U.S. government’s legal obligations to people fleeing persecution. She wasn’t thinking about the U.N. treaty on refugees that the United States has been party to for 65 years, an agreement she knew nothing about. She wasn’t thinking of anything beyond what she needed to do in the next few hours to stay alive.

It wasn’t the first time Jacinta had run from the gangs.

It wasn’t the first time Jacinta had run from the gangs. Several years before, she and her sons had absconded from Apopa, about 10 miles north of San Salvador, to escape the children’s father, an evangelical minister who was also a gang leader — a fact she says she was unaware of at first. “He would dress really decently, with a long-sleeve shirt,” she recalls of when she first met him. “I thought he was a decent man, but it turns out he wasn’t.” He beat and raped Jacinta and savagely abused their children. On one occasion, he accused Jacinta of having an affair with the doctor of their younger son, Isaac. On his instructions, gang members murdered the doctor in the hospital parking lot. He told Jacinta he would do the same to her father if she didn’t stay in the house.

As in many parts of the country, in Jacinta’s old neighborhood in Apopa, sovereignty resided not in the state, but in the gang. If residents wanted to leave the area after 6 p.m., even to go to the hospital, they had to get permission from the gang first. If they had friends or relatives dropping in from outside, residents had to give their names to the gang three days in advance. When the visitors arrived, they had to check in with gang sentries, who assigned them an escort. If someone showed up unannounced, they were either turned away or killed.

Members of a police anti-gang force search men in San Salvador, El Salvador, Aug. 14, 2012.

Photo: Tomas Munita/The New York Times/Redux

Jacinta escaped Apopa only to end up in Aguilares, a city controlled by members of the 18th Street Gang (or “Barrio 18”), one of the two most notorious gangs in Central America, who extorted her and the little restaurant she had opened up there for $500 a month in “rent.” Three years ago, she left the country altogether after 18th Street members — “pandilleros” — threatened to murder her for being $100 short on her rent after Isaac experienced an expensive medical emergency. In her absence, the pandilleros, seeking back rent, turned their threats on her family, particularly her two sons. Last year, Alberto and Isaac crossed the Texas border together and turned themselves in to U.S. custody to plea for asylum.

In the time since they fled, 18th Street gangsters murdered Jacinta’s friend who harbored the brothers after their mother left. They tracked down Jacinta’s sister and drove over her leg repeatedly, until her skin detached from the muscle. They threatened Jacinta’s brother and his niece, so they fled, too, and are now hiding in the United States. There’s little doubt what they would do to Jacinta were she sent back into their grasp.

Jacinta’s story is not exceptional. Morris and his colleagues are working with scores of refugees — including 48 children — with histories so similar the atrocities they describe begin to sound almost monotonous. One of those refugees, who asked me not to mention her name out of fear for her safety, is a mother in her 30s who looks a decade younger. She works as a strawberry picker in a coastal agricultural town about three hours north of Los Angeles.

In El Salvador, she ran an internet café out of her garage. Like Jacinta and countless other Salvadorans, the local gang extorted her. When the gang raised the rent, she had trouble coming up with the money. So the pandilleros kidnapped her 10-year-old son and told her they would send him back to her in pieces if she didn’t pay them $500 in the next three hours.

They each took turns playing video games with her daughter while the other three raped her in the next room.

She went to a loan shark to obtain the money, and after a few hours that felt like days, managed to get her son back safely. Then she reported the crime to the police. She requested that the police meet her in a discreet place. Instead, three plainclothes police officers showed up at her door to take a report, in plain view of her neighbors and any gang members who might happen to be nearby. She panicked and refused to talk with them. Soon after, she heard from one of the gang’s leaders. “He told me I had gotten myself into problems, and that I would not have any peace, and that they were going to teach me a lesson.”

The police opened an investigation, which went nowhere for weeks. One of the officers called the victim and told her she was making a mistake by pursuing it. Then, a few months later, one of the police officers showed up again at her home, this time accompanied by three gang members. They forced their way in. They each took turns playing video games with her daughter while the other three raped her in the next room.

A member of the National Civil Police elite forces secures an alleged member of the MS-13 gang during a raid in Santa Tecla, El Salvador, Jan. 31, 2008.

Photo: Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty Images

El Salvador might be called a semi-failed state. It has the highest murder rate in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the highest in the world. Last August saw the most homicides in one month since the end of the civil war in 1992, and the homicide rate has only continued to rise. In many parts of the country, provision of basic government services, particularly law and order, barely existed even before the arrival of the gangs. Now, with Barrio 18 and its archrival, La Mara Salvatrucha (or “MS-13”), in control of rural villages and urban neighborhoods throughout the country, parts of El Salvador are virtually impenetrable by the state. Last summer, Barrio 18 temporarily took over the entire country’s public transportation system by threatening to kill any bus driver who refused to comply with the gang’s “strike.” Over the last few months, El Salvador has been inundated by the Zika virus. The epidemic’s spread has been hastened by gang members routinely turning away government health inspectors and fumigators when they try to enter gang territory, and in some cases threatening, assaulting, or killing them. In much of El Salvador, the government simply doesn’t rule. The gangs do.

“Having to watch kids who are there,” the refugee who works as a strawberry picker told me, “you watch them grow up and then you see them going around killing, you see them in the news in body bags, dismembered, and it becomes so — normal. So natural for many.”

MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang were born not in El Salvador, but in Los Angeles, where they continue to operate with membership in the tens of thousands. The “18th Street” from which the 18th Street Gang derives its name is in L.A.’s Rampart district, a poor neighborhood a mile or so west of downtown, where initially the gang was composed largely of Mexican immigrants. In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua fled civil wars fueled by American funds, arms, and military training. Barrio 18 began recruiting from L.A.’s growing Central American refugee population, which included young men with combat experience. The gang offered the newcomers protection in their poor, violent neighborhoods.

A police officer searches members of the 18th Street gang during a sweep in downtown Los Angeles, Aug. 11, 1987.

Photo: AP

La Mara Salvatrucha got its start in the neighborhood of Pico-Union. In the 1970s, it was known as “La Mara Salvatrucha Stoners,” or MSS. Gang members were teenage Salvadoran headbangers who wore their hair long, listened to heavy metal music, smoked weed, dropped acid, and drank. Some among them claimed to be Satan worshippers, and like headbangers in suburbs all over America, would throw up their hands in a Hang Ten sign representing the horns of the devil. The gesture remains La Mara’s gang sign to this day.

As MSS expanded, it adapted to L.A.’s street gang culture. Eventually, MSS dropped the “stoners” appellation. Later came the “13,” after MS was compelled to affiliate with the Mexican Mafia, the most powerful Latino gang in America, which claims the number in honor of the 13th letter of the alphabet, “La Eme.”

Like all of L.A.’s gangs, La Mara and Barrio 18 really achieved takeoff with the rise of the crack trade. As the competition over the lucrative new drug turned vast swaths of L.A. into intermittent war zones, the federal government developed new and often shortsighted strategies for containing the disorder. During the tough-on-crime early 1990s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service started a gang task force, and began emptying L.A.’s jails and prisons of MS-13 and 18th Street Gang members and deporting thousands of them each year to Central America.

Many of the young men swept up by the INS had arrived in the United States with their parents as small children. By the time they were sent back to Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, some of them barely spoke Spanish. With no family and no community to rely on, they found one another and coalesced around their respective Los Angeles street turfs, now 3,000 miles away. Groups like the Western Clique, the Berendo Clique, the Normandie Clique, and the Hollywood Clique of La Mara Salvatrucha were resurrected in the streets of San Salvador, Guatemala City, and San Pedro Sula, and then in small towns in the surrounding countryside.

With their American swagger and exotic gang culture, the L.A. transplants were instant celebrities in their new countries. Their growth was instant and exponential. Soon, Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan kids who had never left their native countries were killing and dying for the names of streets in an American city they had never seen and knew next to nothing about. Over the next two decades, the gangs spread like a plague, filling the vacuum of authority left by absent or ineffectual government in the poor villages and neighborhoods of Central America, bringing further chaos and disorder to nations still reeling from civil war, and sending hundreds of thousands of victims running for their lives, seeking refuge in the very country that had incubated the malignancy they were escaping.

Undocumented immigrant families walk before being taken into custody by Border Patrol agents on July 21, 2014, near McAllen, Texas.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

When Alberto first told me his story, we were sitting in the front pew of a small church in the North Hills Methodist center, the late afternoon sunlight dimmed and dappled by stained glass. A pipe organ, two stories high, dominated the wall in front of us. Alberto had just arrived in Los Angeles a few days before. His affect had none of the detachment his mother had shown; his trauma was in the immediate past, and his emotions were still on the surface. He stared into the middle distance as he recounted what had happened to him, his expression alternating between pain and exhaustion. Some things he couldn’t bring himself to discuss at all.

About a year after his mother fled for the United States, five 18th Street members came after Alberto. They found him outside his grandmother’s home, where he was staying, and ordered him to join the gang. He told them no. They told him to let them inside the house, so they could requisition it for the gang. “They said either give us the house, or we’ll kill the whole family,” Alberto said. He refused.

The pandilleros took him at gunpoint to a cane field, where they pounced on him, beating and kicking him for three or four minutes. Then they brought him to a gang flophouse and threatened to kill him if he moved. By that time, however, his grandmother had discovered that he was missing, and the whole neighborhood was out searching for him. The gangsters let Alberto go, telling him he’d be dead if he called the police.

Before long, the gang came back for him. They kidnapped Alberto and his brother, Isaac, who was 12 at the time, when they were at church. The two brothers were kept locked in a dark room with no windows, so Alberto doesn’t know how long they were there; he guesses five or six days. The pandilleros beat the two boys regularly.

A row of beds at the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility in New Jersey, an ICE detention center run by Corrections Corporation of America.

Photo: Mel Evans/AP

The gang wanted ransom money for the brothers, on top of “back rent” for the months since their mother had left. Alberto has a wife and baby daughter; they threatened to kill them both. They sent his family a picture of a baby they had scalded all over with boiling water and said they’d do the same to his daughter. From Los Angeles, Jacinta came up with the money and sent it to her father, who secured their release, took them directly to a coyote, and sent them on the long miserable journey to the Texas border.

In February, Alberto went before an immigration judge with an attorney provided by the Church World Service, an ecumenical relief organization, and requested that his case be transferred to Los Angeles, so he could be reunited with his family. Isaac was still a minor when he surrendered himself to ICE custody. He had been sent to L.A. to be with his mother. Alberto was 17 when he left El Salvador, and had turned 18 while on the migrant trail. As an adult, Alberto was refused the small mercy shown to his brother and was sent instead to the York County Prison.

The judge agreed to Alberto’s request, pending payment of a $6,500 bond. Pastor Morris helped raise the bail money, and Alberto was released from detention in Pennsylvania and put on a Greyhound bus to California. The brutal winter that was enveloping most of the country at that time had covered the landscape with the first snow he had ever seen in his life. Alberto was let out into the cold in a T-shirt and jeans, the same clothes he had crossed the desert in. When we spoke, he had a terrible cold.

Today, Jacinta and her sons live in a garage a few miles from the Welcome Center. When I met with him, Alberto was eager to work. Isaac was thriving in his new environment. Ismael Lopez, a Mexican-born undocumented college student who crossed the border with his brother as a child, is a volunteer mentor at the Welcome Center. He sees in Isaac a huge motivation to achieve, as if he were making up for lost time. Before they fled Apopa, Isaac’s father wouldn’t allow him to go to school. In Aguilares, Isaac enrolled but was put in a class with a teacher who forced him to fight other students.

Ismael sometimes tries to get Isaac to talk about what he’s been through. He knows from his own experience how therapeutic it can be. But Isaac has been unwilling to revisit the nightmares of his past.

Jacinta was recently rejected for asylum. She is appealing the decision, but if it stands, she will be deported back to a country where pandilleros who have already murdered one of her friends and threatened and maimed her relatives are actively searching for her. Alberto and Isaac still have a chance of being granted the legal right to stay in the United States. Their asylum claims, if proven, plainly meet the standard. But then so do the claims of many other refugees who have been deported. Jacinta and her family have bet their lives on American compassion, because they have no other choice.

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a government of fools..started with the C.I.A. drugs deals to cover for the Reagan/Bush.. Iran/Contras.. Arms For Hostages… now we blame everyone but ourselves for it.
IRAQ, second time around with George W. Bush – trillions of dollars – countless deaths (our & theirs) 14 years and no exit. TERRORISTS?? created / caused …by drones?? killing innocent bystanders….A Government of FOOLS – now the New York City Police have TERRORIST DRILLS and exercises
The WAR MONGERS of WASHINGTON all say the same “WE WILL PREVAIL”
three fools = see no end = knows no end = doesn’t want it to end……
WE would be better off if every politician was executed….CUT – THAT – FOOLS

The refugee crisis in the 80 was a by – product of the desire of Soviet officials to control Central America and the Panama Canal. Elites in these countries ignored the plight of the poor and this too was a cause. What the Reagan Admin should have done was resettle them elsewhere in Latin America. The amount of money it cost to maintain a family in dire poverty here would have bought a nice life in Peru, Ecuador, or many other countries. The poverty those 1985 refugee children found here in America made them the way they are. We need to learn from this experience given the crisis going on in the world with refugees. We have the highest now since the end of WWII.

So America created the gang culture that has made Central America so uninhabitable, right? So the solution is to relocate everyone to Southern California? Why not just send them to Canada or Sweden or something, makes about as much sense.

The problem here is you’re not solving a problem, the gang problem, you’re merely relocating it back to the USA and hoping it will go away. Again might as well send them to Canada where they’ve never had a gang problem.

Refugees are going to have kids right? (Unless you’re proposing some sort of gender restrictions) Why wouldn’t they become gang members just like the refugees from the 1980s did? Have we solved the Gang riddle yet? No, of course not.That’s why you should send them to Canada, so that those nice Canadians can set a good example for how to behave.

In the beginning – God created the heavens and the earth. NOT REALLY in the beginning the administration of Ronald Reagan / George H.W. Bush …in order to pay for the “arms for hostages” … they used the C.I.A. to smuggle drugs into the U.S.A. – mostly L.A. the drugs came from central america ( the contras).
This is all well documented in the Senate hearings about the IRAN/Contras – arms for hostages. The book “Dark Alliance by Gary Webb” covers it.
George became head of the C.I.A. after his stint as V.P……later to become President….

I know America and others has created chaos in the World that has spawned refugees and created uncontrolled and unsustainable immigration. America cannot fight endless war across the Globe or provide sanctuary to all those that want a better life or even safety to those in danger. It is a big World with lots of forces and problems beyond our control or imagining. Presently, America is both morally and financial bankrupt. We cannot police, fix or save an over populated World. Many of our efforts to do this have ended very badly for everyone.

Wealthier Nations and peoples cannot absorb the World’s poverty and violence we can and should extend aid and help others secure and prosper in their own Nations. This MAXIM should be the bedrock of our National security. Further population control and resource conservation should be a big part of this. Pure capitalistic expansion of people and consumerism will burn a good part of our plant and peoples. At that point the US will bring home its military close its borders and watch much of the World burn. If we choose the negative path I am glad I am old and will probably not live to see it. WE and others have been very very wrong it will take a LOT from ALL to set it right.

America cannot fight endless war across the Globe or provide sanctuary to all those that try to escape which lives have been destroyed by the greed of the US elite and the apathy of the rest of the US population, right?
But population control might be a solution, as the US government can safely rely on years of forced sterilization of poor people.

This arrival started with an 18 yr old ADULT, who bypassed illegally staying in Mexico to attempt to illegally stay in the US, and then he complains? Jails in the US are kept cool for a reason and it is NOT a hotel. The fellow does not qualify as a refugee. The women and children mentioned certainly did not go to another town in their own country or a next door neighbor country to re establish themselves and they are in no danger from their governments. They are not refugees. These folks are like folks who crash our system from all over the world. They have heard of our free schools, free emergency rooms, and food stamps and all their babies born here get. That is the extent of their problem. They want to abuse our system. Otherwise they would have fled to Mexico or Brazil.

People like you are destroying this planet. Your lack of empathy, knowledge, and utter ignorance is truly an embarrassment to humanity. I have seen more compassion in animals. Educate yourself, and learn more about U.S. History than what was fed to you in grade school, the facts are available to you if you just search. The problems in Central America were in great part caused by the U.S. and I find it ridiculous that people like you want to pretend otherwise. You ruin countries, and treat your victims like they are the criminals! Are you serious?! I am appalled that my tax dollars are used to aid murder, corruption, and injustice in foreign countries, where poor and innocent beings are the victims.
Where do you find your information? Where do people get all that free stuff you claim they get? Did you not read the article? One victim is working in a field, picking berries for (likely) way below minimum wage so that YOU can then drive to the store and pay $1.99 for a lb. I’d like to see you in a field working for $3/hr. Dealing with the trauma, sadness and loss of hope all of these people have to deal with on a daily basis.
My advise to you: Be informed, be compassionate and be part of the good in the world, for your senior years and future generations-sake.

I think it will be a good idea to first give the illegal folks an AK-47 each along with lots of ammo and then throw them over the wall.That way they can go eliminate the gangs and the rapists who turn up here.

Too many people are not familiar with Pancho Villa. Too many are not aware that the settlers fought at the Alamo and died there. In the old testament, it was common practice for the conquering army to kill every last person of the adversary lest any remainders grow and teach the old ways and legends to new generations.

It’s just a guess, but the 45,000,000 that have come across the southern border in the last 50 are just starting.

Interesting notion – but I think a better idea would be to roll back NAFTA.

Why? Well, one of the main drivers of immigration to the U.S. from Mexico is the collapse of small-scale farming due to U.S. agribusiness dumping corn and other products on the Mexican market (which is facilitated by NAFTA’s no-tariff rules). This drives farmers into poverty, and many then try to get into the U.S. to work as cheap labor in the U.S.

This cheap labor drives down wages in the U.S., impoverishing working-class citizens – but that’s the NAFTA plan, a one-two punch that devastates working families in BOTH Mexico and the United States, while greatly enriching the corporate elite who pocket the difference. Without that steady stream of undocumented immigrants, who can be paid much less than American citizens, Wall Street profits on agribusiness would be much lower.

Both Sanders and Trump understand this dynamic, although they present it in different ways to the public (since Sanders and Trump have different political bases). Trump unfortunately goes with ‘fear the Mexicans’ but in fact, gutting NAFTA would be very good for the domestic Mexican farmer, as well as for working-class American citizens, because it would eliminate these market manipulations that have done so much damage to both groups.

I had an old teacher, he had showed us a video by marijuana . It can be produce much with Mariuhana , even gasoline! It is political, the oil companies would do billions harm if they would make with Mariuhana gasoline! It would be for our environment definitely better!

Everyone knows there is no war on drugs. That would be tantamount to a self-serving bureaucracy waging war against the purest form of laissez-faire capitalism on Earth. I don’t think anyone knows how to legalize drugs in a socially responsible manner.

They don’t teach drug-law reform, and I’ve heard of any foundation that cared enough to solicit a holistic solution. Some jailhouse lawyer would be more likely than an academic.

Meanwhile, we need to help these terrorized people, considering they are the blowback from this Jim Crow war and the coups are government sponsors. The good Clinton, George, had a lyric that said, ‘if you don’t like the effects then deal with the causes’.

This article is a persuasive evidence that something needs to change about drug laws.

However, if the underlying message here is supposed to be, “their lives are so terrible back home, we need to take them in,” I’m not persuaded that is the right strategy. There are probably billions of people around the world with sad, desperate lives. The US can’t take them all in. Better to work on strategies to use our global power to improve the world, and stop destroying it with wars and pollution.

OK, but, once we have destroyed people’s homelands with our wars, support for dictators and other interventions, creating unliveable conditions and driving mass refugee problems (as in, e.g., El Salvador), we probably have a responsibility to those seeking refuge, no?

Please give me a break…They are not “refugees” by any standard and if we are to use gang violence now on equal terms as WAR, PLEASE….How about taking care of our own citizens in places like Chicago that are dealing with similar conditions? Ridiculous…

street gang membership needs to be illegal
America was founded on the nuturing and development of INDIVIDUALISM. Gangs are the opposite of that. They are unamerican and do not belong in the american culture. Americans built roads, cars, buildings, and the like. Others prefered to live with the land and trees. There are other differences.

This is the problem Donald Trump is referring to. It’s not like you can say “get a degree in engineering and voila”. There are types of people who are more attracted to gangs than degrees, more attracted to extortion than protesting.

You can feed a hungry lion all the time and he wont bite you. When you dont you quickly discover what the fallback position is. Some people types just handle stress differently. For whatever reason, evil ways adhere more easily among some than others.

This article seems to imply that the US is supposed to be a refuge for any and all who want to leave from a place where criminals want to have all the land and power they can take by chasing people away. Israel and Syria are engaged in the same practice. Look how that’s turning out. There are 250,000,000 people south of the border in poverty. Other govts will catch on to that practice and unload their overpopulations onto America, Australia, Britain, Germany, France and Canada.

There is a better way.
1. If you dont have resources, the idea of having children to obtain resources doesn’t cut it.
2. Goverments that dont provide a good and healthy operating environment should be removed.
3. All resources for survival should be publicly owned and operated.
4. Currency should be tied to produced assets and not loaned.
5. The US should engage in population management. The current baby production factory will have a disastrous end and… wealthy and persons of elected power will tend to engage in family empires AKA TRIBES (couch romney) and nepotism (cough hatch).

There is a solution for all these problems and the planet is running out of time and resources. My guess is, greed monsters will prevent any pre-planned solution from being implemented as long as they have the power to bleed the populations they feed off of.

“This article seems to imply that the US is supposed to be a refuge for any and all who want to leave from a place where criminals want to have all the land and power they can take by chasing people away.”

By “seems to imply,” you actually mean, “I infer.”

How do you feel about refugees from countries where much of the reason for the intolerable and deadly environment can be traced to US involvement, intervention and other meddling — for instance, El Salvador?

Clearly the US has violated all that is good and descent. The failure of the US to hold CIA, politicians, wallstreet and CEO’s accountable is beyond compare and beyond reason. I would vote to have them and their descendents stripped of their assets and used for reparations.

But the refugee thing only exacerbates the problem. In the US the mix of good persons providing shelter for criminals who run the drug empire who send the money back to those who pay the police and corrupt the politicians who empower the drug lords who chase away more people…This cycle is nuts. And it is a cycle. It won’t stop. More people, more drugs, more crime, more murder, more corruption, and on and on. This has been going on since the 60’s and it’s worse every decade.

We are going 300mph into a brick wall. The patchwork tinkering is not a plan, obviously. The situation is so bad, even a good fix will be hugely painful. And i just read that Russia is selling 80 tanks to Nicaragua.

What will work?
Free drugs
Population management
Guaranteed life support
A new currency system

What about suite gangs? You know,, legal crime syndicates that have cartelized every sector of America to leverage monopoly market power via extortion. I would suggest that me-generation individualism invited the monopolism of suite thugs. Banksters, insurance cartels, military industrialists, mainstream media all prosper from crushing free enterprise

We have drug wars to create prison gangs via profit motives while subsidizing the ruthless oxycodone trafficking of Big Pharma and its suite gang extortion
Rugged individualism is now a fiction, similar to Wall St. entrepreneurs who
flourish from too-big socialism for monopoly takeovers.

Left-wing commentators like to complain about warmongers who never learn from the lessons of history. So I think maybe it’s time to ask this: The U.S. backed a government and it became death squads. The U.S. took in El Salvadoran refugees and they turned into MS-13. Why is the U.S. taking in more El Salvadoran refugees going to turn out any better? The more we set up an exchange between cultures, the more we create the financial circumstances that drive violence. And it seems far too easy to see just how we don’t want this culture coming here. We don’t want people living in our neighborhoods who are going to see their brothers burned to death with blowtorches unless they rob us and send the money home. This backward nativist Know-Nothingist line of thinking never made so much sense as now, I think.

Between this idea and its antithesis, that we should help the victims of U.S. policy, we should seek a new creative synthesis. And surely that synthesis is this: let’s help them, but let’s help them somewhere else. Let the U.S. atone for its evil work in Nicaragua by subsidizing the building of new cities by refugees for refugees, cities that are wisely designed for economic self-sufficiency and safety and private civil life. Let’s pay the Nicaraguans, and the Costa Ricans and the Belizians (?), to provide refuge for the people we don’t want to provide refuge for here. We outsource every other goddamned thing in this country – why the hell can’t we outsource refugee support?

Because the Nica government is left wing.. so 1. they solve they problem much better and 2. the US won’t give a cent to Sandinistas. At best, we can hope Clinton is not preparing a coup there, just like Honduras in 2009, where she claimed “fair and free” elections where a candidate is not permitted to run.

/b/Somewhere else /b/ anyway doesn’t exists, as they are no safe place there. The police is as corrupted as the gangs. In surveys in suburbs with maras in honduras, poeple report trusting more the maras than the police.

The only thing the US can do is stop the gangs at home and legalise drugs or whatever illegal market that gangs control.

I’m all for drug legalization, yet to some it almost misses the point. We need to unify the attitude of being pro-legalization with being anti-addiction. We need to unify a view of people who grow their own drugs for noncommercial distribution as heroic and defiant with a view of those who pay gangs for drugs as being material supporters of terrorism. We need to be not pro-drug or anti-drug but I-don’t-give-a-damn-about-drug, instead firmly opposed to the gangs, corruption, violence, and prison, not as a way of advancing one side or the other about drugs but as an end in itself.

Addiction is a disease, and I’ve come to believe universal health care is the best way to handle disease. Anyone who has an opiate problem should be able to get a bed in a treatment facility as quickly and conveniently as today he could walk into a police station with a needle in his arm and get a cell at the local jail. We believe in rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, and giving people help against addiction often tends to preserve all three.

“Anyone who has an opiate problem should be able to get a bed in a treatment facility as quickly and conveniently as today . . .”

Yup, we should provide help for people who want and need it. And anyone who freely decides to use opiates, whether s/he is “addicted” or not, should be able to do so, without interference. There’s no legitimate reason for you, or anyone else, to oppose addiction.

Maybe it’s our fault. Maybe it’s their fault. Maybe it’s both. Right now, all I’m asking is, did we like what happened last time so much that we want to do the same thing again?

There are a half dozen countries nearer to El Salvador than the U.S., that didn’t spawn Mara Salvatrucha. Why they have to come here? Why do we have to heap huge rewards on only the ones with the money and/or gang connections to make it all the way through Mexico without getting apprehended, while ignoring the plight of the ones who barely made it over the nearest border?

“Like all of L.A.’s gangs, La Mara and Barrio 18 really achieved takeoff with the rise of the crack trade.”

This really is the basis of the argument for legalizing and regulating drugs; the gangs coalesce around the drug trade and war with each other over control of markets, production, financing, etc. It’s the exact analogue of how the U.S gangs (aka the Mafia) formed in the Prohibition era around the illicit alcohol business.

Note that even after Prohibition ended, the gangs persisted for decades (having moved into the illegal drug business). In all cases, the proceeds of the drug sales are laundered into legal cash by the U.S. banking system. The poster child for that is HSBC; after being caught laundering drug money for the Sinaloa cartel, Lorreta Lynch (US Justice Dept) offered them a ‘deferred prosecution agreement’ and no criminal charges; current FBI Director James Comey was on their advisory board of directors to help them clean up their image. Of course, the kids who work for the gangs as drug mules or street dealers don’t get deferred prosecution; instead, long prison sentences are the norm, which benefits the massive prison complex in the United States.

It’s interesting to see how cannabis legalization is causing drug-related crime rates to fall, as the demand for imported cannabis from Mexico has plummeted, undermining the financial basis of the gangs. Probably makes Wall Street unhappy as well, as that means less dirty cash for them to launder, and hence, lower profit margins.

Reagan is the founder of this feast, of course, for his support of brutal death squads and cross-border terrorism from El Salvador. He is also its founder for the War on Drugs and the criminal gangs it subsidized. He is also its founder for the CIA-Contra cocaine connection, which subsidized both the death squads in El Salvador and the foot soldiers tasked with spreading the stuff in minority neighborhoods in L.A. But let’s not also forget his role in securing the organization’s future with the 1986 illegal immigration incentive program, which awarded people front-of-the-line status for citizenship for the good deed of evading immigration authorities. That’s part of it too.

quote”During the tough-on-crime early 1990s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service started a gang task force, and began emptying L.A.’s jails and prisons of MS-13 and 18th Street Gang members and deporting thousands of them each year to Central America.”unquote

Deport? Why not fly out over the Pacific and push them out of the plane. Who cares. They’re animals who murder, torture… er ..wait.. so is the USG.. Ok then.. load up Bush, Cheney et al with the gang members. Then push them all out of the plane.